Has U.S. leadership gone awry? Senators Chris Coons and the honorable Dianne Feinstein recently announced they will introduce the Climate Action Rebate Act, which aims to generate $2.5 trillion in tax revenues over 10 years by slapping a fee on oil, natural gas and coal starting in 2020. This isn’t leadership. This is followship without the fairy tale ending. read more »
Policy
Is It Time To Rethink Density?
With new forecasts of record population growth across Australia’s major capital cities over the next few decades and affordability remaining a challenge, is it time to reconsider the core principles and policies that guide the management of this growth? read more »
The Unintended Consequence Of The Green Movement Is The Creation Of More Homeless
The green movement has done a great job of stymying the growth of nuclear power generation. That in itself creates an oxymoron. Nuclear is the only known technology to generate zero emission electricity on a continuous uninterruptable basis. read more »
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The Regression of America’s Big Progressive Cities
If there’s anything productive to come from his recent Twitter storm, President Trump’s recent crude attacks on Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings have succeeded in bring necessary attention to the increasingly tragic state of our cities. Baltimore’s continued woes, after numerous attempts to position itself as a “comeback city,” illustrates all too poignantly the deep-seated decay in many of our great urban areas. read more »
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Who Needs Democracy Anyway?
On the 18th June this year, climate change demonstrators glued themselves to a main street in the centre of Brisbane, protesting what they regard as a climate emergency and to voice their objection to the recent approval of the Adani coal mine in Australia’s Galilee basin. Their protest caused major disruptions to CBD traffic and has since continued with a series of deliberate actions to block inner city streets and cause as much congestion and disruption as possible. read more »
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Governor Newsom Champions Measures That Would Take Us Back To Medieval Times
Governor Newsom is vocally supportive of the Green New Deal that would take us back to medieval times. The Governor’s statement on July 12th was scary. He is looking into putting a moratorium on fracking for oil and wants to reduce the state’s reliance on fossil fuels. read more »
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The Tech Oligarchs Are Going to Destroy Democracy — Unless We Stop Them
When there is a general change in conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed, and the whole world altered. —Ibn Khaldun, 14th-century Arab historian
Congressional posturing about tech firms may have quieted for the moment, but the existential crisis that these firms are creating remains as now unchecked. Even faced with opposition on both sides of the aisle, the oligarchs—those five tech giants that now constitute the world’s five most wealthiest companies—continue to rapidly consolidate economic, cultural, and, inevitably, political power on a scale not seen for over a century. read more »
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LSE Economist Paul Cheshire on Urban Containment and Housing Affordability
Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, has distinguished himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent housing economists. This article discusses his recent interview with Ahir Hites, a senior research officer in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Research Department, reported in The Unassuming Economist Global Housing Watch Newslettter. read more »
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In Defense of Houses
A critical component in the rise of market-oriented democracy in the modern era has been the dispersion of property ownership among middle-income households—not just in the United States but also in countries like Holland, Canada, and Australia, where it was closely linked with greater civil and economic freedom. In its early days, this dispersion was largely rural, but after the Second World War, it took on a largely suburban emphasis in the U.S., including within the extended metro regions of traditional cities like New York and Los Angeles. read more »
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Age of Amnesia
We live, as the Indian essayist Saeed Akhter Mirza has put it, in “an age of amnesia.” Across the world, most notably in the West, we are discarding the knowledge and insights passed down over millennia and replacing it with politically correct bromides cooked up in the media and the academy. In some ways, this process recalls, albeit in digital form, the Middle Ages. read more »
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